@thomasfuchs I don't think there are many bad programming languages out there (at least if you discount languages designed to be bad, like Malbolge and INTERCAL). Each was built to solve a problem, and most of them succeeded.

So by what measure should we define a "good" programming language? Good for what? Conversely there are always use cases a language might fare poor in, e.g. Rust is hard to compile quickly, so if you need quick turnaround, use something JITted instead.

@thomasfuchs I think Ruby is like most big languages - the good-parts subset is pretty nice, but if you have to deal with code that uses the bad parts it can ruin your whole week. I'm glad I don't have to work in it anymore, because the hybrid oop/functional mix and the weird programming styles people use was really starting to piss me off. The &. operator was kinda the last straw for me. But when I was able to use Ruby like it was Smalltalk-80 it was pretty great.

@thomasfuchs
I mean, it's no HyperTalk but from what I've seen it's not terrible.

@[email protected] How about "have seen many programming languages and found Ruby not to be a good fit for my brain/specific flavour of neurodivergence?"

Although even there, the problem isn't Ruby as such; I hit a brick wall on Rails being very opinionated and convention driven and I didn't agree with the opinions or like the conventions. There's very few languages I would say are "bad", and I'll avoid mentioning any by name to avoid stirring any pots.